A coverage calendar is a working document, not a wall chart. Its only job is to answer, for any future date, the question "who is guaranteed to be reachable?" Most teams try to build one by importing every national holiday feed they can find into a single shared calendar, discover that November has forty coloured blocks in it, and quietly stop looking. The method below produces something smaller and more useful, and it takes an afternoon.
Start by deciding what you are protecting
Before you touch a date, write down the things that must not stop. For most teams the list is short: production incident response, customer support during contracted hours, payment runs and payroll cut-offs, regulatory filings, and inbound freight clearance. Everything else can wait a week without real harm.
This step matters because it converts a calendar problem into a staffing problem. You are not trying to know every holiday in thirteen jurisdictions. You are trying to know whether the four or five things on that list have a named, awake human attached to them on every date of the year.
Three layers, kept separate
Confusing these three is the most common failure, and it is why "we have a holiday calendar" so often coexists with "nobody knew they were off."
- Public holidays. Statutory or gazetted days, per jurisdiction. Stable, published in advance, and the layer this site covers.
- Employer shutdowns and collective leave. Not law, but just as binding in practice: Japanese mid-August and year-end closures, Indonesian cuti bersama collective-leave days, factory maintenance weeks, and Western firms that close between Christmas and New Year.
- Individual leave. Unknowable in advance and the actual reason most escalations go unanswered.
Give each layer its own colour and never merge them. The public-holiday layer explains why a whole country is quiet; the other two explain why one specific person is.
Pick anchors, not everything
Do not track thirteen calendars. Track the jurisdictions where you hold an obligation. A team with engineering in Shenzhen, support in Manila, a plant in Ho Chi Minh City, finance in Singapore and enterprise customers in the United States and the United Kingdom needs six calendars, not the whole region. Add a market only when someone can name the obligation it carries.
One warning: pick the calendar of the place where the work happens, not the place where the headquarters is. A Singapore-registered company with a Vietnamese factory follows Vietnamese dates for anything involving the factory floor.
The 2026 collision weeks
Once the anchors are chosen, the useful output is not a list of holidays but a list of weeks where several anchors are down at once. These are the 2026 weeks that repay attention.
| Week | Who is out | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| 16–20 Feb | China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Vietnam all observe Lunar New Year from Tue 17 Feb; the US takes Presidents' Day on Mon 16 Feb | Write the week off for anything cross-border. Freeze changes from 11 Feb. |
| 30 Mar – 3 Apr | Good Friday on 3 Apr in Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and the UK; Maundy Thursday 2 Apr in the Philippines; Qingming 4 Apr in China, Taiwan and Korea | Only Mon–Wed are usable. Move Thursday and Friday rituals. |
| 13–17 Apr | Thailand: Songkran, Mon 13 to Wed 15 Apr | Thai coverage effectively gone for the full week. |
| 27 Apr – 1 May | Japan 29 Apr; Vietnam 30 Apr; 1 May in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia | Last safe decision day is Tue 28 Apr. |
| 4–8 May | Japan 4–6 May; China to 5 May; UK early May bank holiday 4 May; Korea 5 May; Thailand 4 May | The densest week of the year. Assume nothing joint happens. |
| 21–25 Sep | Japan 21–23 Sep (Aged Day, citizens’ holiday, Autumnal Equinox); Mid-Autumn on Fri 25 Sep in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan; Chuseok in Korea | Thu 24 is often the only shared working day before Mid-Autumn. |
| 5–9 Oct | China to Wed 7 Oct; Korea 5 Oct substitute and 9 Oct Hangul Day; Japan 12 Oct follows | Do not plan an East Asia launch. Backlog week. |
| 21–25 Dec | 25 Dec across almost every market except mainland China, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam | Deadlines to Thu 17 Dec. Nothing after that is real. |
Quarter by quarter
January to March
The quarter is dominated by one event. Lunar New Year's Day is Tuesday 17 February across seven territories, and the length of the resulting shutdown differs enormously between them — from three gazetted days in Hong Kong to a block running to 22 February on the mainland. Around it, note Korea's Independence Movement Day falling on Sunday 1 March with a substitute on Monday 2 March, and Indonesia's unusual sequence of Nyepi on Thursday 19 March followed two days later by Idul Fitri on Saturday 21 March.
April to June
The busiest quarter, and the one that catches new teams. Good Friday on 3 April is shared by six of the thirteen markets here. Songkran takes Thailand out from 13 to 15 April. The 29 April to 6 May stretch is the region's peak, described in more detail in the China–Japan comparison. Then a run of religious observances: Vesak Day and Buddha's Birthday on Sunday 24 May in Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea; Hari Raya Haji and Idul Adha on Wednesday 27 May. Juneteenth on Friday 19 June gives the US a long weekend that European teams routinely forget.
July to September
Quieter on paper, riskier in practice, because so much of the disruption is non-statutory. Japanese mid-August closures and northern-hemisphere summer leave overlap. The statutory markers are Hong Kong's Establishment Day on Wednesday 1 July, the US observing Independence Day on Friday 3 July, Singapore's National Day substitute on Monday 10 August, Korea's Liberation Day substitute on Monday 17 August — the same Monday as Indonesian Independence Day — and the UK summer bank holiday on Monday 31 August, which is also National Heroes Day in the Philippines.
October to December
Two distinct problems. First, an East Asian cluster: China from 1 to 7 October, Hong Kong from 1 to 3 October, Taiwan's Double Tenth on Saturday 10 October, Korea's substitute Monday on 5 October and Hangul Day on Friday 9 October, and Japan's Sports Day on Monday 12 October. Second, the long Western decision slowdown from US Thanksgiving on Thursday 26 November through to the new year, made worse in 2026 because Boxing Day falls on Saturday 26 December and the UK substitute normally moves to Monday 28 December.
Single points of failure
The reason to build any of this is to find the dates on which one person is the only route to something important. Take your protected list, walk it across the collision weeks above, and look for gaps. Payment approval that only a Singapore-based finance lead can give will fail on Friday 3 April and again on Monday 10 August. Customs paperwork that only a Manila team handles will fail on Thursday 2 and Friday 3 April, and across the All Saints' and All Souls' pair on 1 and 2 November. Deployment approval resting on one Tokyo engineer fails from 3 to 6 May.
Each gap needs one of three answers: a named deputy in a different jurisdiction, a documented pre-authorisation, or an explicit accepted risk with a customer told in advance. What it must not have is no answer.
The handover note
Before every collision week, one person should send a short note covering four things: which dates the team is unavailable, who covers each protected item, what will not be done, and when normal service resumes. Send it two weeks ahead for a week-long block and it will be read; send it the afternoon before and it will not.
Keep the calendar itself somewhere boring and central, review it once a quarter in a thirty-minute meeting whose only agenda item is updating it, and copy the tables from each market page — Singapore, the Philippines, the United States and the rest — rather than retyping dates.
One honest limitation. Everything in this article is a planning baseline drawn from published 2026 dates, and several of the layers it depends on are not fixed: Indonesian collective-leave decrees, Thai cabinet bridge holidays, faith-based dates that depend on observation, and company shutdowns that are pure convention. Confirm the specifics with each local team and against current official notices before you build a commitment on top of them.